About the game

War Huts is a medieval strategy game played in your browser — and on your phone, at the same address. You found a village in a free hut on the map, make it grow, train an army and decide what to do with it: hunt monsters, take deposits, trade or attack your neighbours.

Time runs even with the game closed

Nothing here is a counter that only ticks while you watch. A seven-minute build finishes in seven minutes whether you are looking or not; a marching army comes back right on time; the Kitchen queue delivers everything it should have while you were asleep. That changes how you play: what holds your growth back is not money, it is the clock — and choosing what to build now matters more than how much you have stored.

The village

Twenty-seven buildings on twenty-eight plots, with the Village Center on a square in the middle. The Center is the ceiling for all the others: no building goes past its level. It is also what sets the size of your village on the map — and that is how your neighbours know from afar who they are dealing with.

The iron chain

Some resources are not extracted, they are manufactured. The Mine digs ore, the Charcoal Kiln burns wood into charcoal, and the Furnace puts the two together into an ingot — which the Shieldbearer and the Knight need in order to exist. Three bottlenecks you manage in parallel, and that is what makes a cavalry worth something.

The Temple: one blessing at a time

The Temple is the first building whose effect you choose. There are four blessings, and they apply to the whole village: Gatherer (expeditions collect more), Butcher (more damage), Protector (more health) and Craftsman (faster queues). Only one is active at a time, and you may only switch seven days after choosing — without the wait you could turn Butcher before every attack and switch back afterwards, and the decision would be no decision at all.

The House of Magic Items

At the top of the ladder, next to the Altar. It forges three things, one for each champion — the Sacred Sword for the Paladin King, the Indestructible Bow for the Shadow Archer and the Staff of Destruction for the Dark Mage — and each gives its owner +25% health and damage, permanently. Every item costs a Magic Stone, which only drops by luck on the map; forging one ties you to that champion, because the next one costs another stone.

The battle

Combat is not a sum of "who has the bigger number". It is a simulation: every troop has health, damage, attack rate, range and speed, and picks its target by its own rule — the Knight hunts the back line, the Spearman strikes whatever is close, the Mage punishes the crowd. You place your army on a grid before setting out, and watch the battle afterwards, frame by frame.

Whoever dies really dies — on both sides. A big base can be broken in two attacks, and the defender's army is not scenery.

Not everyone who falls dies

With the Hospital built, 30% of your losses come back wounded instead of dead, and get up right away for a fraction of the troop's price. What it gives back is not resources — the bottleneck in this game was never your purse — it is the queue time that army cost you. Without a Hospital there are no wounded: whoever did not build it loses troops the way they always did.

Attacks no longer come as a surprise

When someone sends an army against you, the Mail delivers a letter the moment it sets out, saying who is coming and at what time — in your time zone, not the server's. How many, no: the size of the army is what the attacker gets to hide, and giving it away would make defending always the optimal choice. The journey stopped being a clock only the attacker could see and became the time the other player has to react.

And each player can only be attacked by you once a day: four player villages a day, and none of them twice. It exists against siege — without the rule, the strongest neighbour empties a village in back-to-back marches and whoever got hit has no window to train, ask for help in chat or change their defence. Not even the turn of midnight opens the door: between two attacks on the same player there are always two hours. Retaliation, though, goes out immediately — that is exactly the window the rule exists to give.

Whoever is on guard does not march

The troops you place in your defence plan are reserved: they do not leave home for anything — not a village, not a monster, not a deposit. Guard duty is guard duty. The hard case is the champion: only one fits, so putting the Paladin King on defence means giving up taking him on the attack, and his aura counts on one side or the other, never both.

The Defense Tower fights

It is not a number on the village sheet: it enters the field and shoots, with an archer's range, and while a tower still stands the village has not fallen — even if everything else is dead. You can have two, and the second is a real building, with its own plot and level. Knocking one down is worth it and costs the owner dearly: it stops defending until it is rebuilt, and comes back at the same level for the price of the last step.

Setting up your army without the patience

The grid holds 96 troops, and nobody has to paint all 96 by hand: one button fills everything with what you have at home, each troop in its own line. And you can save three ready-made armies — one click and it lays itself out; if troops were missing, the panel says what was missing and assembles the rest.

The map

Besides villages, the world has deposits guarded by creatures (orc wolves at the crystal vein, dwarves in the grove, bees in the reed bed, mushrooms among the herbs) and Gorvaks and Vulkrans, which are the highest rung of the game. To harvest a deposit you have to take the right explorer along: prospector, lumberjack or herbalist. Without one, you beat the guard and come back with nothing.

And there is one more thing on every target you beat: a 0.5% chance of a Magic Stone dropping, the rarest material in the game. No building produces it and no explorer brings it — either the map gives it to you or you do not have it. Nests and fishing do not drop it: the nest already pays with the animal, and at a shoal there is no guard to beat.

Fishing: the target with no battle

The river that used to cross the map is gone: today there are scattered lakes, and it is inside them that the shoals appear. A line only passes near whoever lives on it — with the lakes spread out, the farthest water on the map is about a hundred seconds of marching from any village. When the map grows, the new ring comes with its own lakes.

A shoal has no guard at all. You send a single Fisherman; he travels, fishes for five minutes and comes back with the fish, which the Kitchen turns into Roasted Fish — the dish the six best troops in the game demand. What limits it is not danger, it is the race: there are eight shoals, each worth one catch only, and fifteen minutes later another appears in any of the lakes. Whoever arrives second finds nothing. It is the only thing in the game where players compete by getting there first rather than by beating someone.

The boar herd: the target with no specialist

Six on the map, guarded by three boars, and it is the only gathering spot that requires no explorer at all: win, come back with the meat. It is the first gathering target a beginner can reach, before having the Explorers' House — and it costs the same army as a crystal vein, so it is not a fake step.

Nests and pets

In the nests lives an animal, and the one who brings it back alive is the Tamer — without him on the expedition, you beat the guard and the animal stays wild. What comes back is not a troop: it is a pet. It does not fight, does not march and does not die. There are four species, and the map gains more nests as more people join. Each species helps in a different way:

• Scorch — lives in the Charcoal Kiln or the Furnace and speeds up what comes out of them, from 5% to 25%.
• Balu — lives in the Market and increases the gold that drops at map spots, from 2% to 15%. It is the first one that does not speed up a queue.
• Kiro — lives in no building at all: it goes along on the expedition and increases the harvest from 3% to 20%. Each one knows how to gather in a single kind of place, drawn when you capture it.
• Nerion — also leaves home, and shortens the march from 5% to 40%, there and back. It is the only one that works on any target, an attack included.

The tougher the nest, the rarer the animal — and the rarity is the mechanic: a 40% Nerion is one in four hundred. Five of each species fit in your collection, and it is that ceiling that makes the decision exist: with a full collection, the new animal waits twelve hours in the report until you let one of the five go.

The Market

The Market opens an anonymous noticeboard: you do not set the price, you do not see who buys and you do not know who you are selling to. The price is the quote of each resource — selling pushes it down, buying pushes it up, and it drifts back to normal over the day. You list a lot, someone buys it, and the gold lands in your purse minus the fee, which goes down as your Market levels up. Reading the quote before dumping is part of the game.

Against other players

Attacking someone's village means attacking that person's real army, with the troops they trained and in the places where they put them. The loot really comes out of their stock, and they get the report of the attack — with the battle recording, to watch it from their side.

Clans

From Village Center Lv. 3 on you can found a clan or join one. It levels up with the members' daily tasks — things everyone already does while playing — and each level either opens a slot or grants a skill point: faster building, more damage, more health, quicker marching, bigger harvests. The skills apply to every member.

The clan also has an army of its own: a donated troop leaves your barracks and becomes the clan's — and it takes your village's strength with it, because it keeps the building and upgrade levels it had when it left. That army is what the two group-only things are fought with.

Collection points

Fixed spots on the map that never expire: a clan holds them, and every ten minutes they yield wood, stone or ore into the vault. The defence is a positioned grid, like a village's, and the spot shows the power of whoever defends it — an attack with less than 75% of that is refused, which stops a friendly clan from losing on purpose to hand the spot over. After an attack it gets a two-hour shield, whoever won.

The Citadel

A castle at the centre of the region that collects 1% of everything the region produces for the clan that won the last tournament — and nobody pays a tax: what it yields is generated on the side.

The dispute is a weekly knockout. Entries close on Saturday at noon and the bracket is drawn right then; the first battle is at 13:00, and one round every three hours. Entering costs 5,000 gold and five armies of 96, which stay reserved until the end — each tie is five battles, and three wins take you through. Whoever is knocked out takes the losses from their own tie; whoever goes through keeps all five armies intact, and the champion only pays the losses of the final.

The campaign: the other side of the veil

When the map starts to feel small, a gate opens in your own village, and on the other side stands your army in its dark version: the same troops, 45% tougher, fuelled by Enemy Souls instead of food. There are a hundred invasions, one at a time, in order.

It is the only battle in the game with no travel: it happens on the click, and whoever survived is home that same instant. Losing costs nothing but the army — you train again and try once more right away. What it charges you is soldiers, with real losses and wounded through the same Hospital door.

Beating certain stages unlocks new buildings in your village: stage 40 gives the Underworld Barracks (and with it the four line troops from over there), 60 the Workshop, 80 the Altar with the three dark champions, and 100 the House of Magic Items. The campaign ends exactly where the game tree ends — the underworld champion's item is the top of everything, and it would not sit well twenty stages short of the finish.

Enemy Souls only drop when you defeat people. Attacking or defending, one per player troop struck down, and only once the Underworld Barracks is standing. From a rival, a monster or a deposit none drop at all: the resource exists to be the price of combat between people.

Achievements, titles and banners

Thirty-six achievements in seven groups, and ten of them grant a title. There are few titles on purpose: it is the scarcity that makes a title mean something. Whoever has the achievement has the title, and there is no second list for the two to drift apart.

Each title can be raised on one of the five flagpoles at the edge of your village — and their window says plainly that they are decoration only, with no bonus whatsoever. Without that sentence players would start hunting for an effect that does not exist. A banner does not fly on two poles: the deed is one deed.

It is not only war

A neighbour is a person, and you can talk to them: there is a world chat and private conversations per pair of players — arranging a truce or a deal is what makes a single world a world instead of a list of targets. The leaderboard has four boards because the game has four paths: Power, Conqueror, Hunter and Trader — and the last three are counters that only go up, so they tell a story: whoever spent all their gold is still the one who was the greatest trader.

Lost? Click the resource

There are nineteen resources, and nobody has to memorise where each one comes from: clicking an item on the stock bar opens a guide that answers where it comes from and what it is for, with a picture of each place and a shortcut that takes the camera to the nearest spot to your village.

In development

The game is under construction, and we say so plainly: two troop attacks still play without their own animation, almost every building still shows the same drawing at any level — only the Village Center really grows — and new things land every week. If something looks wrong, it probably is, and the support page says how to tell us.

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